


Loss of Care By Old Care Done

by Siguna



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Listed characters are characters so far, M/M, More will be added as the story progresses, Which hopefully it will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:25:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siguna/pseuds/Siguna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Picks up where the Avengers leaves off, with Loki & Thor headed back to Asgard. Loki has other ideas, or at least so it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The two of them clatter to the ground – Loki muzzled and bound still, Thor letting loose the tesseract to grasp for him. Loki twitches away. Thor’s fingers sway for him; Loki rolls out of his reach. Limbs limp, he doesn’t try to get up. Doesn’t try to move, except to get away from Thor. 

Thor stands. Brushes his plated chest and looks around with aching eyes, aching for home and for stillness. Then his hammer drops. 

“Loki,” Thor’s voice creaks. He turns to the unmoving heap on the ground. Loki gazes back stiffly. 

Thor glances around again then whirls on Loki, small eyes pinching into a raged squint. His hands clamp Loki’s shoulders and drag him from the ground. Loki’s body swings in his grip, uncaring; not still when Thor bellows terribly, “Where have you brought us?”

Loki’s body sags bonelessly into Thor’s. Boots draping the ground with no attempt to keep balance, neck slumping listlessly over the thunderer’s. Thor grunts him off, shakes him, and Loki flops in his grip. Thor roars, “Answer me brother, I command it!” his great chest heaving. At this, Loki makes a garbled noise from behind his muzzle.

Thor holds him by the back of his neck with one hand and tears the muzzle off with the other. Loki’s lips gasp apart as the steel peels away. He sips at the air and twitches a slow hand, chained loosely to his other, up to rub at his jaw. “Look at me,” Thor rumbles, clenching Loki’s face and twisting it upwards.

Loki’s mouth, crushed in Thor’s grip, quivers as his eyes sway in their hollows. He looks at Thor. Under his stare Thor’s face loosens, and then so do his hands. As they fall away so does Loki, stumbling to the ground. He falls with his legs splayed out and his upper body crumpled forward into itself, chin spearing his chest.

“Brother,” Thor says hoarsely, dropping to his knees in front of Loki. He digs thick fingers into his blond mane, hands gripping his head from either side. “Loki, I – brother, for Odin’s sake look at me.”  

He watches the white crown of Loki’s forehead rise slowly against the darkness, then the hot green gaze is burning his watered eyes. “Do you yet cling to your infantile convictions?” Loki sneers. It is the first thing he speaks and Thor’s brow crunches at the words. Loki glances to the side then drops his head back into his chest. 

Thor inches closer on his knees. Loki twitches slightly at the proximity. “If you mean about us being brothers,” Thor says heatedly, and Loki lifts a pale hand. Without looking up he says, “I beg of you to spare me, Odinson.”

When Thor clatters to the ground in a tangled mess of grunting cape with the whispers of Loki’s apparition fading around him, Loki, appearing in his true form a few feet away, doesn’t so much as look up at his trick. He materializes in the same hunched pose, head still bent into his collar. No quip, not a mocking glance. Thor collects himself from his failed lunge and looks at him helplessly. “Br –”, he starts, then buries his face into his hand. “Will you not tell me where we are?” he says, small, into his palm. 

“Difficult, is it, to remember a place you came only to destroy?” Loki is still staring at the ground. Thor’s hand drops and he shakes his head. “I suspected,” he says, his voice shuddering. “But why?”

“I am home.”

“Asgard – ”

“I AM NOT OF ASGARD!”

The sudden rage of Loki’s cry rings against the frosty rock of their surroundings and a crag over Thor’s head erupts. When the thunderer dives out of the way the avalanche of jagged ice hurtles after him. Loki’s shoulders, snaking with green wisps of magic, heave violently but he doesn’t look up as Thor dodges and blocks. Finally Thor thrusts his arm out for Mjolnir and sends a lightening bolt into the rush of ice, shattering it into a harmless rain.

Thor is gasping his breath back as he turns back to Loki. He drops onto his knees in front of him again, and something falls from the air onto his head. “Gah!” he barks out, grabbing at his head and looking around to see what it was that hit him. 

The tesseract. 

“Go home,” Loki says tiredly.

“Not without you,” Thor answers immediately, and Loki sighs into his collar, like he’d expected that. “Don’t, then.” He gets to his feet, his most deliberate movement since they’d landed.

“What do you intend to do?” Thor demands. He stands up as well. “What place can you possibly have here?” Louder, harsher. “What do you know of Jotunheim, anymore than I do?”

Loki finally looks up. “If I do not know then Odin is to thank, perhaps you could do that for me when you see him.” He walks right up to Thor, teeth gnashing in his face. “All I know is that I do not belong on Asgard. I never did, and I never understood. You, Odinson, cannot fathom what it has been like for me. Do not attempt to show me concern!” He turns away as soon as the last words are out of his mouth, stalking off into the night frost.

“ _You_ are my _brother!_ ” Thor bellows after him. “I will not leave without you, nor let you stay on this wretched land!” His bleary squint shifts anxiously as Loki pauses, only for a moment, shaking his head slightly, before picking up his stride again. 

Thor brushes a thick hand across his eyes and angles Mjolnir. “Forgive me, brother.” 

The hammer swerves around Loki’s apparition and crunches into his materializing chest, not easily outsmarted as its wielder. Loki is cannoned back several yards before he collides with ice rock and crumples to the ground. His throat contracts against Mjolnir as he tries to breathe, tries to stretch his head up out of the pooling black that’s sucking him in out of the air, and he chokes on it, chokes on the darkness and sputters to breathe, to stay afloat, but all he can feel is the black and then nothing.

“Loki, can you hear me?” 

The words cut through the haze in Loki’s throbbing skull, followed by a burly hand on his cheek and he acts on instinct. A green spark lights his fingertips and Thor flies off of him and skids into the ice on his back. Loki’s eyes snap open and he gasps for breath, but finds none, his lips pushing against padding and steel. 

“That was unwise,” Thor frowns as he gets to his feet. “You should not have wasted your strength.” He returns to Loki’s side and gazes at him apologetically. Loki heaves long drags of air in through his nose, his chest heaving in frail synchrony, and glares back with as much poison as he can muster.

“Brother, you must know it pains me to do this to you,” Thor says, running his fingers into Loki’s matted hair. Loki’s brow tightens and he tries to sit up, but barely manages to tilt his head forward before it comes thumping back against Thor’s hand. Loki trembles, dragging desperately for air through his nose. He can feel the damage dealt by the blow from the hammer combined with the muzzle’s incapacitating effects settling in full, and his heart sinks in his shuddering chest.

He turns a tired cheek into Thor’s palm. If only Thor would go away. Thor gathers him into his arms and Loki collapses feebly against him. Only his nostrils move, sucking needily at the frosted air.

When he wakes up Thor is asleep and holding him tightly. His plated chest feels nice against Loki’s cheek and lying there for a century or two seems a better prospect than attempting to get up. He tries shifting his head and everything spins. His nostrils pull sharply at the air and his eyelids quiver, then drop.

When they twitch open again the frost feels sharper against his skin and his chest is aching. Loki manages to sit up but almost instantly is overtaken with dizziness. He falls back, and Thor catches him. 

Loki grunts feebly into his muzzle and blinks hard, crushing away the moisture building up in his eyes. Thor eases him onto the ground, and it’s softer, snow instead of ice, freshly fallen. Loki’s chest heaves with his frail breathing. His eyes dart, looking anywhere but at Thor. 

Thor kneels down beside him. “I am so sorry, brother.” His voice is small. He can’t seem to keep his hands out of Loki’s hair and Loki yearns for the strength to shake him off. “I should not have hit you so hard. I’m so sorry.” Loki wonders how many times Thor apologized to him when he _wasn’t_ conscious. He bristles against Thor’s touch. 

“You must understand I had no other choice. I – ” he drops his head into Loki’s chest, then presses his lips, after hovering there for a moment, into the skin exposed at his collar.

Muzzle or not, Loki’s sure he would vomit if his stomach weren’t empty. “I’m sorry,” Thor whispers for the umpteenth time. “Once you recover from the blow we’ll go back to Asgard.” He nods into Loki’s chest. “And everything will be better.” Loki wonders if he can vomit his stomach lining.

Thor slumps over him and stays like that, his shoulders shaking a little as if he might be crying. Loki musters as much strength as he can and shoves him off. Thor sits up and looks at him and sniffs loudly. His eyes tremble; Loki’s glare is steel. 

Thor’s arm comes down then, hard, on Loki’s and he pulls it up, chain rattling, over Loki’s head and then drags the other one up beside it, holding them both there with one hand. His body bears down on Loki’s, near crushing him, and Loki grunts indignantly into his muzzle. He breathes hard. Tries to push his knees up against Thor’s enormous weight but can’t; tries to summon a bit of magic but barely manages a wisp that instantly fizzles out. Thor growls at the green spark and pushes Loki’s hands deeper into the snow, pushes his head into the crook of Loki’s neck and his tongue against Loki’s chilled skin. Loki screeches viciously from behind his muzzle.

“I’m sorry, sorry,” Thor mumbles, his lips at the muzzle, beneath which Loki’s mouth fills with bile. He swallows it down. “Shh, I’m sorry. Shh.” Thor smoothes Loki’s hair back and kisses his pulsing throat.

The acid continues to rise in Loki’s throat, forcing him repeatedly to force it back down. His protesting dwindles. Thor gropes at his body, shoving hands in beneath leather and metal to get at shivering flesh, and Loki just sputters into his muzzle. His cheek hits the snow with a cold crunch when Thor turns him onto his stomach. He breaks into a muffled fit of coughing, choking on bile. A salted drop of moisture slides from one glazed green eye into the frost.

Then everything stops abruptly. The grabbing hands pull away from his skin and the crushing weight is lifted off of him. Loki turns feebly onto his side and then the muzzle is torn off of him as well. He retches gratefully into the snow. 

“Brother,” Thor’s voice wafts in vaguely from somewhere above him. Loki spits out more bile. The wind cuts at his exposed chest where Thor has ripped the leather open and he shivers, folding into himself. Only his neck stretches out as he gulps for air. 

Thick fingers touch his hair again and Loki snarls out of their reach. He rolls onto his back, chest thumping, and glares blackly at Thor. “Brother,” he spits, and gasps out a short laugh. “Brother, after _that?”_

Thor looks down at his hands and a grimace stretches across his face. “I stopped myself,” he mumbles brokenly, more to himself then to Loki. Loki snorts. “I. I don’t know. What – what came over me. I’m so –” 

“Sorry?” Loki’s laugh is stronger this time, short but sharp. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and looks at Thor through scornful eyes. “Go home already.” 

He expects Thor to wail something about not leaving him; what he’s not prepared for is Thor’s beefy grip closing round his throat, holding him there until Mjolnir is in his other hand and he’s setting it down, leaden cold, on Loki’s chest. Loki hauls his neck up, teeth grinding. _“Really?”_

Thor ignores him, turning around and striding across the snow. He returns with a luminous object swinging from his grip – the tesseract. Setting it down, he reaches for Loki. 

“Thor you enormous oaf, if you don’t ge – ”

Muzzled again. Loki howls. 

Thor straddles him to hold him down before swinging Mjolnir onto his wrist by the leather strap. He takes Loki’s hand and forces it around a handle of the tesseract, holding it there and taking the opposite handle in his other hand. He twists the handles in his hand and Loki’s, mouthing _forgive me_ as the blue flash swallows them up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first fic in this fandom so I hope you've enjoyed it :) 
> 
> I'm not sure yet how many parts it'll be or how consistent I'll be with updates but I'll do my best. 
> 
> Though the first chapter is approached more generally, the coming ones will be in close third person from Loki's POV. 
> 
> The title is taken from Shakespeare's Richard II, Act IV, Scene 1 (I kind of suck at titles).
> 
> Thank you for reading! Feedback is most welcome.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki's return to Asgard following the Midgard fiasco is not quite what he'd pictured.

Frigga’s hands are cold. 

Loki’s head spins when he tries to lift it, a rush of dizziness hitting him at the sudden movement after being asleep for so long – at least a week, by his reckoning  – that slowly subsides. The fingers he recognizes to be Frigga’s weave in and out of his hair. Which is damp. All of him is, sweet and sweat-smelling at once, as if he’d been bathed and then had sweltered, under the weight of blankets and hands and people standing and breathing over him, and of the nightmares that are coming back to him now in scraps and yes, he is sweating still. Sweating in aches and tremors and he needs to move, to shake this from himself.  

He tries to shift and his limbs rattle, chained down. Throwing his head back with a grunt into cushions that feel familiar, he opens his eyes.

“Shh, darling,” Frigga says softly. She tucks a strand of hair back behind his ear, laying her other hand across his cheek. He grazes the room with his gaze, slow and unfocused, before looking up at her, and he’s back in his own bedchamber and chained to his own bed. “Mother,” he says before he can stop himself.

He watches her eyes moisten. “Loki, my dear one. I’m sorry it had to come to this.” The words tug at his chest and his lip quivers, for just a moment before pulling into a taught line. He tears his eyes from hers, turning his cheek into her palm. “It is no dungeon, at least.”

He had been expecting a dungeon. He had been expecting worse than a dungeon.

“Loki! As if we would.” She sounds scandalized, and he tilts his head back up to look at her, gaze steeled. “Wouldn’t you?” A beat later, “Wouldn’t Odin?” Because no, she probably wouldn’t, and if there’s anyone he’s going to be fair to – 

“No, my son. Your father –”

“He is no father of mine,” Loki cuts her off. He isn’t going to have _that_ , not even from her.

“Loki, you mustn’t talk that way.” Frigga pauses her stroking to turn his face up, looking down at him sternly. He gazes sullenly back. “You must understand the need to keep you bound. But he would not toss you to the dungeons.”

“He said that?” Loki presses. Frigga lets go of his head. “Do not exert yourself unnecessarily,” and she rises. A little stiff, a little reluctant. “Mother,” he says and the word is easy on his tongue, easier than he’d thought it’d be – easier than _father_ or _brother_. He reaches out for her, pulling against the chains as far as he can, which is not far. Her expression seems to collapse and she meets his hand in hers. 

“I don’t want to see him,” he says, voice low. “Or Thor, or anyone.”

Her eyes well up again. Loki’s gaze only stiffens, though he can feel his brows arc up against his forehead. “Rest,” she says simply, patting his chest. He watches her go, and his eyes are still on the door long after she’s gone. Then they drift up to the ceiling, with its gilded fixings and dripping chandeliers. He looks at the velvet hangings around his bed and the brocaded silk sheets wrapped around his body, and he really doesn’t understand. 

Loki goes back to sleep, partly because he is still exhausted and partly for lack of anything better to do. It’s not like there is much he can do, in these chains. He’s barely drifted off though, it seems, when a large hand on his shoulder is shaking him awake. Loki opens his eyes with a snarl.

Thor with a tray of food. So Frigga isn’t going to listen him. He really, really does not have the patience for this right now. “Get out.” 

“Please, brother. You’ve not eaten in weeks.”

“Out.”

“You need sustenance!” Does Thor even hear him? “Odin’s beard, you look frail as a bird.” Thor touches Loki’s pale hand and, that’s about enough. Loki tries to yank his hand away but the chains barely leave him margin.

He can’t lift his arms more than an inch or two off the mattress. Let alone to hold a spoon. Ha. He gives Thor an unimpressed glare. 

Thor swallows uneasily. “I – I could feed you, if – ”

Dear Norns, is he serious? “Oh you’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

Thor’s face floods red. Really, he has a knack for setting himself up for his own ridicule. “Just,” Loki hisses, twitching a hand towards the door. Thor mutters something that sounds suspiciously like an apology – Loki rolls his eyes – before shuffling out with the tray. His exit is followed by a loud clatter.

Loki is staring at the ceiling again – were the chandeliers always this horrendous? – when Frigga comes by with another tray. Expecting him to allow himself to be fed from her hands. What is wrong them all? “Let me free and I’ll do it myself.”

“Loki, your father – ”

“If Odin prefers me to starve,” Loki starts, turning blazing green eyes on her. He doesn’t understand why she keeps dragging Odin into everything. Why doesn’t Odin show himself? Explain himself?

Perhaps Odin will come by and force-feed him.

They unchain him eventually. Frigga stays, distrusting less because his bounds are gone and more over whether he will really eat. He tries entreating her to leave him to his meal in peace and that, of course, doesn’t work. Her eyes follow each bite as he takes it. He keeps his face impassive. When he sets his cutlery down, she stands up in protest. “Loki, that is not nearly enough.”

“I beg you, mother, do not mistake me for that glutton son of yours.” Food intake should never, ever be set by Thor standards, she must know that.

Frigga smiles, and it makes him smile back, but she takes his fork anyway and tugs a piece off his barely-touched shank of mutton. He yields and takes the shred of meat between his teeth when she holds it to his mouth. “Too old to be fed by your mother?” she says reproachfully. 

Loki chews slowly, not looking at her until he’s swallowed. “I cannot be angry with you,” he says quietly, pushing the tray aside to make way on the bed. Frigga sits down on the edge of it and puts her arms around him. “Dear one, I do not want you to be angry at all. With anyone.”

He lets himself sink into the embrace, and tries to let all his cares slip away from him if only for a moment. Wanting for that moment to recede back into a small boy, to drown in the comfort of his mother’s arms and not have to think about anything.

If he does manage to lose himself briefly, it all comes hurtling back at dizzying speed. “Do not hope that I can forgive him,” he mumbles into Frigga’s shoulder.

“Loki, he loves you.”

“He does not. He lied to me for centuries.”

“We both did. To protect you.”

“You told me yourself that you had wanted to tell me the truth from the beginning. And _you_ did not have to _pretend_ to love me.” Loki looks up at her. “Nor was _he_ very good at it. It was always clear that he favored the blond oaf. At least, now I understand why.”

“Loki, that’s not –”

“You never filled my head with false purpose either, mother. You know as well as I do why he ever brought me here. He never – ” Loki coughs back a sob. The endless years of trying to _be_ something in his father’s eye and always, always falling short, no matter what he did, and the confusion that came with it, he does not want to be remembering this right now, he does not _need_ to recall the constant weight of his own perpetual failure to measure up, carried around until he’d learned that every bit of it had been one great lie – 

And him supposedly the master of deception.

Frigga pulls him back into her arms. “You are hard on him, my son,” she says, rocking him gently, and Loki can hardly believe the words as they leave her mouth. He can hardly believe how Odin’s predilection can be so lost on her, and he finds himself pulling out of her arms. Wanting to voice all the turmoil in his soul, but not managing it. Why can’t he?

Because he doesn’t want to make it sound like an excuse?

Isn’t it one?

Perhaps it doesn’t justify Midgard. Does he care?

He hadn’t at the time. That’s what he can’t say to Frigga. He’s not sure whether he even cares now. 

She reaches for him again. “It is no matter. In time –” He stiffens, cutting her off. “Time will do nothing.” 

“Loki.”

He pulls away from her again. “Leave now mother, please. I wish to bathe.”

It’s only partly an excuse to get her to leave. Out of the hot bath and clad in soft suede, Loki manages to calm a little. Frigga had purposely left the tray behind in hopes, he knows, that he might eat something more. He picks at it, leaning casually against the side of the bed while staring at his door and pondering what enchantment to set to it to keep Thor out. Because, Thor is undoubtedly not going to give up on trying to worm his way back into Loki’s heart. 

Perhaps not even _back_ , not the same way. Loki shudders.

He’s still considering it when the door starts to open. He tenses, a subdued green flame hovering at his fingertips. 

Odin walks in. 

“Ugh,” Loki says, but he vanishes his magic. Odin stares from him to the bed in surprise. “How did you escape your bonds?”

A small smile sweeps Loki’s lips. How interesting that she kept it from him. “Mother’s doing. Didn’t she tell you?” He advances, closer to Odin. “Ah. But I daresay you won’t object.” Odin is silent. Well, Loki is bent on getting _some_ answers from him. “Why have you come?”

“To see my son.” 

Did he seriously just say that? Loki blinks. “You’re worse than Thor,” Loki sneers. “Or have you truly begun to believe your own lie?” He moves slowly around the room, circling Odin. His tongue snakes over his dry lips, eager and fleeting. “Tell me why you’re really here. Tell me why _I’m_ here. Why you had me taken right back to my own bed and looked after, as if I’d merely returned with Thor from one of his idiotic excursions and not from wreaking havoc on another realm. Tell me why I’m not lying cold on a dungeon floor right now, left like the miscreant I am to suffer the aftermath of Thor’s efforts to drain me, instead of here, regaining my strength.” He comes closer, voice dropping just above a whisper. “Tell me, are you not afraid of what I might do once I am back to full power? Mother’s heart is soft, but you cast your true son out before.” He pauses, hovering just behind Odin now, at his ear. “Odin, why do you not order me back into those chains?”

“Enough!” Odin rumbles, lifting his staff. Loki steps back. And then Frigga is there, getting in between them – standing with her back to Loki, one hand reaching behind her for his and the other lifted in front of Odin. 

“Step aside, mother,” Loki says quietly, although he cannot hide the smug look from his face. “Frigga,” Odin urges through gritted teeth. 

Loki places a hand on her shoulder. “It’s alright. Surely Odin would not strike a son of his.” 

Odin’s faces compresses into clear frustration, and then he growls “Hwwwrrrangghhh!” and swings his staff at the wall. A blue jet shoots out and shatters one of the high, arched windows.  

How typical. “Ah. Only demolish his son’s room. Well, we can live with that. Come, mother.” Loki twines his fingers into hers. “I would go and see Sleipnir. I do hope no one’s been wearing him out.”


End file.
